Jesu Moratiel
Moratiel’s main series reflects on the human environmental impact on nature and its communities. Several dead bees are encapsulated in their own honey to propose a comparison between these animals’and humans’ lives. He also experiments with the multifaceted possibilities given by technology to explore our relationship with it. Get ready to see a music playlist or a digital map in fascinating shapes.
What was your very first source of inspiration?
If we're talking about the very first one, I think it was my mother. At least my mother gave free rein to let the inspiration flow. I was a very nervous and unruly baby, the typical ADHD and whenever we went out for a walk it was an ordeal for her. One day, we went into a shop and the shop assistant saw that I didn't sit still, and she liked me a lot! so she gave me a little notebook and a pen. I took it and started scribbling like crazy, my first works. Surprisingly I concentrated a lot and stopped moving, so my mother quickly saw the potential for her benefit, and tied the notebook and pen to the baby seat. From then on we could go for walks without me nagging her, me concentrating on drawing and she enjoying the walk.
““I think every artist should talk in his work about the things that interest him or her. Every artist should make the works that he would like to exist.””
You are profoundly interested in nature and science. How do you express it through your art?
Well, I think I'm a curious guy in general and the consequence is that I'm interested in science and nature, which is to say everything. So it's inevitable that the things that interest me will show up in my work, because I think every artist should talk in his work about the things that interest him or her. Every artist should make the works that he would like to exist.
You use the resine as a time capsule to insulate the nature. Why did you choose particularly bees?
It was almost by mistake. At first, the very first work I made with them was thought to be just a big pile of dead bees, dry, without resin, like a huge mass grave of miniature corpses. But suddenly I thought how beautiful the amber looks, reminiscent of honey, as if it were solid honey, in which insects are trapped... and it all clicked. As if the bees were dead and isolated in their own honey, by their own product. A bit like what the catastrophist theories say that can happen to humans...
To answer your question, I have always had a special admiration for insects, or micro-worlds, in particular bees and ants. I think that with a little imagination and curiosity it is not difficult to find the points in common that we have with them. They are fantastic beings, like micro dinosaurs.
“I think every artist should talk in his work about the things that interest him or her. Every artist should make the works that he would like to exist.”
Nowadays people are completely into technology, it’s a significant part of everyone’s life. Which aspects do you explore through your work?
The topics are infinite, I do not focus on one or two. Social networks and internet are the medium in which the most current human concerns swim. Our relationship with sexuality and sensuality, desires, passions and fears, loneliness, loss of identity, depersonalisation, anonymity are some of them... Although I am interested precisely in the relationship we have with technology and social networks and how they are changing our habits so rapidly, I like to see it more as a series of almost completely new techniques that offer a thousand possibilities for experimentation.
Have you ever imagined yourself doing something different than your art?
Before I started my degree I considered studying architecture, biotechnology and medicine... I even went to pay the registration fee at the university of medicine to study it! But the only thing I was quite clear about is that I would like to be an artist, so I changed my mind at the last minute and went straight into fine arts. Since then I have imagined it many times, especially when I lived in poverty and was very depressed. But changing my way was always the last of the possibilities!
What do you see in your next future?
Oysters, lobster and speed lined up with many new projects coming out in the next three months.
interview ANNA FEDERICO
Editor JOSEFINE MORIKO
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